OpenAI shuts Sora app
OpenAI has shut down the Sora app and is folding its Sora science team into a broader reorganization, with Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles announcing departures on April 17. ( )
OpenAI is shutting down Sora’s app and web product, ending its standalone video service as two senior leaders leave the company. (help.openai.com, techcrunch.com) OpenAI’s help center says the Sora web and app experiences will be discontinued on April 26, 2026, and the Sora application programming interface, or API, will be discontinued on September 24, 2026. The company told users to export videos and images before the shutdown and said remaining Sora data will be permanently deleted after any final export window ends. (help.openai.com) Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles announced their departures on Friday, April 17. TechCrunch reported that Weil had been leading OpenAI for Science and Peebles had been the researcher behind Sora. (techcrunch.com, theverge.com) Sora was OpenAI’s attempt to turn text prompts into short videos, a consumer product built around the same basic idea as image generators: type a description, get synthetic media back. Its shutdown pulls one of OpenAI’s highest-profile creative apps out of the market less than two years after Sora first drew wide attention. (openai.com, techcrunch.com) The move lands in a broader reorganization inside OpenAI. TechCrunch reported that OpenAI for Science, the internal group behind the Prism research platform, is being absorbed into other research teams. (techcrunch.com) TechCrunch also reported that Sora had been losing an estimated $1 million per day in compute costs. Wired reported that the science application Weil led is being folded into Codex, another sign that OpenAI is consolidating products rather than running separate side projects. (techcrunch.com, wired.com) The departures add to a wider management shakeup. CNBC reported that the exits came weeks after product and business chief Fidji Simo said she would take a medical leave, and TechCrunch said enterprise applications chief Srinivas Narayanan is also leaving. (cnbc.com, techcrunch.com) For Sora users, the timeline is now fixed: export your files before April 26 if you want to keep them. For OpenAI, the product is no longer a standalone bet. (help.openai.com, techcrunch.com)
